The co-CEO of Build a Rocket Boy, the developer behind MindsEye, has made claims that people are being paid to negatively talk about the game. All the way back in 2014, longtime Grand Theft Auto producer and Rockstar North president Leslie Benzies left Rockstar Games for a sabbatical, but when he returned in early 2016, he was asked to leave the office. This spawned a big lawsuit as he claimed he was forced out of the company and was entitled to millions in unpaid royalties. The exact reasons for his departure from Rockstar Games remain a mystery as the lawsuit was settled confidentially.
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Benzies went on to form a new studio known as Build a Rocket Boy which has been developing an ambitious game called Everywhere as well as MindsEye, which is a more traditional action game that definitely takes some cues from Benzies’ Rockstar work. It’s not an open-world game, but it’s expected to get some kind of open-world support after launch. Nevertheless, the game is one of the big releases hitting this summer, but some fans have been concerned about it. A new gameplay video was released today that made the game look pretty solid, but prior to this, gameplay for MindsEye was few and far between. Some fans feared that Build a Rocket Boy was withholding extended looks at the game to prevent negative reactions.
On top of that, MindsEye had some leaked footage and negative previews from content creators who noted that the game didn’t feel ready for release and could use a delay. Others have recently pointed out that Build a Rocket Boy reportedly has concerning working conditions with crunch and unreasonable expectations to quickly implement or change key features in the game. All of this has created some negative reactions to MindsEye just weeks before its launch.
Build a Rocket Boy co-CEO Mark Gerhard took to the game’s official Discord today and was asked if he believes that “all the people who reacted negatively were financed by someone” and he said “100%.” He followed it up by saying “Doesn’t take much to guess who.” Given there’s some crossover with the GTA and Rockstar Games community due to ex-Rockstar people being involved with MindsEye, it left some to speculate that he was implying Rockstar Games is paying people to react negatively to MindsEye. To be clear, Gerhard never mentioned Rockstar directly, this is just something fans extrapolated from his comments.
Gerhard was confronted about this in Discord and began to clarify his comments by saying there’s an effort to trash MindsEye and Build a Rocket Boy. “There is a concerted effort by some people that don’t want to see Leslie [Benzies] or Build A Rocket Boy to be successful that are making a concerted effort to trash the game and the studio. Its pretty easy to see the bots and the repeated replies to any content that we put out.”
When pressed further about his beliefs that someone is being paid off to talk negatively about MindsEye, whether it be content creators or ordinary fans, Gerhard responded with the following: “No I never said that. I do KNOW that there are bot farms posting negative comments and dislikes.”
Whether it’s bots or living people, Gerhard believes there is someone acting maliciously and financing some sort of campaign against the game. We’ve reached out to Build a Rocket Boy’s PR team for further clarification on these comments and will update this story if we hear back.
MindsEye is out on Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC on June 10th.
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